Heartland Payment Systems Exposes Credit Card Transactions

Credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems has disclosed that the Heartland systems were infected with malware which led to the exposure of an untold number of credit card accounts over a multi-month period. To give you an idea of the extent of potential victims, Heartland processes 100 million transactions per month on behalf of 250,000 merchants throughout the U.S. and Canada, many of which are pay-at-the-pump gas stations and convenience stores.

So while we do all we can to protect against ID theft and to keep our own systems free from malware, we can still be victimized when a third-party credit card processing company over which we have no control fails to keep our transactions secure.

Even worse, Heartland's security was apparently so lax they weren't even aware of the compromise until Visa and Mastercard alerted them that there was a problem. The compromise apparently began sometime last Fall, so you'll want to carefully check your credit card statements from the past several months as well as any new statements going forward. And if you see Heartland Payment Systems identified on the card swiper, it just might be best to use cash or shop somewhere else.